Qualcomm has hired Sailesh Kottapalli, a former chief architect of Xeon server processors at Intel, to lead the development of the company's data center CPUs, reports CRN. Kottapalli spent 28 years at Intel and worked on various projects, including x86 and Itanium, as well as CPUs and GPUs. More recently, he was responsible for multiple generations of Xeon processors.
"As we head into 2025, I am excited to share that I have joined Qualcomm," Kottapali wrote in a post on LinkedIn. "The opportunity to innovate and grow while helping to scale new frontiers was immensely compelling to me, a once-in-a-career opportunity that I could not pass on. The start of this new chapter also coincides with the closing of a previous one at Intel that lasted 28 years. This experience was tremendously gratifying, and I would like to acknowledge it."
Kottapalli joins Qualcomm as a senior vice president and will lead the company's data center CPU efforts. Qualcomm's upcoming server CPUs are expected to use cores developed by engineers from Nuvia, a company Qualcomm acquired for $1.4 billion in 2021. Nuvia originally designed its Arm-based Phoenix (now called Oryon) cores with data centers in mind, but Qualcomm uses them for Snapdragon X system-on-chips (SoC) for consumer PCs, which upset Arm and led to litigation between the two companies.
This is not Qualcomm's first foray into server CPUs. The company previously attempted to enter the market with Centriq but abandoned those efforts in 2018 and laid off its development team. This new initiative marks a return with a stronger focus and expanded resources.
It should be noted that a wider range of data center software now supports the Arm instruction set architecture. Furthermore, as Amazon expands its Graviton-based offerings, the data center industry's confidence in Arm processors increases, so Qualcomm has every reason to assume that demand for its upcoming server processors will be higher than it was back in the day. To some degree, the hire of Sailesh Kottapalli serves the same purpose as people tend to trust server industry veterans.
Just yesterday we also learned that Qualcomm is looking for an SoC Security Architect for its Data Center Team.